Tag Archives: Celery

Instagram is one of the poster children for social media site successes. Founded in 2010, the photo sharing site now supports upwards of 90 million active photo-sharing users. As with every social media site, part of the fun is that photos and comments appear instantly so your friends can engage while the moment is hot. Recently, at PyCon 2013 last month, Instagram engineer Rick Branson shared how Instagram needed to transform how these photos and comments showed up in feeds as they scaled from a few thousand tasks a day to hundreds of millions.

Rick started off his talk demonstrating how traditional database approaches break, calling them the “naïve approach”. In this approach, when working to display a user feed, the application would directly fetch all the photos that the user followed from a single, monolithic data store, sort them by creation time and then only display the latest 10: